U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted his satisfaction that French President Emmanuel Macron is “agreeing” with him that The Paris Agreement is “fatally flawed” after Macron suspended his country’s gas tax until the summer after mass protests and violent riots broke out.
“I am glad that my friend @EmmanuelMacron and the protesters in Paris have agreed with the conclusion I reached two years ago. The Paris Agreement is fatally flawed because it raises the price of energy for responsible countries while whitewashing some of the worst polluters in the world,” Trump tweeted. “I want clean air and clean water and have been making great strides in improving America’s environment. But American taxpayers — and American workers — shouldn’t pay to clean up other countries’ pollution.”
France’s planned gas tax hike is aimed at weaning the country’s people off of fossil fuels, which reportedly contribute to climate change.
Trump is an unabashed nonbeliever in climate change and he has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda, even after his own administration released a report the day after Thanksgiving, effectively trying to bury it when the least amount of people would be paying attention. The report said climate change will wreak havoc on the U.S. economy in the years ahead, to which Trump responded, “I don’t believe it.”
The report, The Fourth National Climate Assessment, outlined the potential impacts of climate change and how it will affect every sector of American society. The report, produced by 13 federal agencies, says the U.S. economy will lose hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, in part due to increasing natural disasters like flooding along the coasts, crop failures in the Midwest and more deadly wildfires in California.
“With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many US states,” the report reads. “Without substantial and sustained global mitigation and regional adaptation efforts, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.”
In regards to the report, Trump also said it’s unfair to the U.S. if other countries are still polluting, and he hyperbolically said the U.S. has the cleanest air and water it has ever had.
“You’re going to have to have China and Japan and all of Asia and all these other countries, you know, it (the report) addresses our country,” he said. “Right now we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been and that’s very important to me.
“But if we’re clean, but every other place on Earth is dirty, that’s not so good. So I want clean air, I want clean water, very important.”
Soon after taking office, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, leaving a pact to curb greenhouse gas emissions made with nearly 200 countries around the world. The U.S. was the lone hold out from the joint communique at last weekend’s G-20 summit, where 19 of the 20 world leaders present agreed on language about climate change and renewed their commitments to help battle it.
Editor’s note: Which side are you on, do you believe climate change is real and we should be doing more to help lead the fight against it? Or do you, like Trump, believe it is a hoax and if so, why? Discuss in the comments below.